Requiem For Strangers
Charlie Bonner’s an extrovert, and this is his Hell
Let me tell you about my friend Charlie Bonner. I don’t remember when I met Charlie — it might have been at a UT baseball game or a fundraiser at Scholz Garten — but one day he wasn’t there, and the next day he was everywhere. We have common enthusiasms for Orville Peck, the Highwomen, and ambitious writing projects in service of a funny title, but whereas I am happy here inside my head, not talking to anyone, Charlie Bonner is an ebullient extrovert. We are living through an epoch of intense suffering. We lost as many jobs in April as we gained in the previous decade. Almost as many people are dying every day from C-19 as died on 9/11. Yet when I think of the people who are having a tough time of it, I think of Charlie Bonner, unable to do what he does best — talk to strangers. I asked him to write us a letter from his own personal hell, and he returned with a lovely ode to his loneliness.
by Charlie Bonner
My mother likes to share the story about the time the family moved my oldest sister into her college dorm at UT and I ran away while everyone was fussing over duvet covers and mini-fridges. When my parents finally found me, I was down the hall knocking on doors and introducing myself. “Hi,” I told the perplexed freshmen. “I’m Charlie Bonner. I’m in college.”
I was only five years old then, but I am just as likely to knock on your door today. In the years since working in politics, I’ve built a whole life around talking to people. But all of that changed in March when social distancing eliminated strangers from my life.
My friend Haley and I are quarantining in a small apartment in Austin where we now live, work, and drink wine by the case. I’ve known Haley since high school, and there is seldom a story she hasn’t heard sometime over the last ten years. “I know, Charlie,” she says kindly when I repeat myself. “I know, Charlie,” she says less kindly when I repeat myself twice in one day. She is given brief respite from my insistent chattering when I Zoom with a college buddy or attempt to play trivia with my family over Facetime. I am grateful for this, but I find myself missing the novelty of strangers.
Sometimes strangers are best admired from a distance. Over a cup of coffee at the bakery on 43rd street, you can find all of humanity in the strangers. On slow days, I make a game of fabricating the backstories of the ladies and their lattes (each on the verge of a bitter divorce) and the boys with their coffee black (all secretly gay, only in need of a young Charles Bonner to guide them). Then, of course, there's the regular cast of characters, such as the lanky older man who almost exclusively wears tight-fitting-white-overalls that compliment his aged hair and mustache. He brings his own coffee mug and reads from little vintage books while crossing his legs with more dramatic flair than even I can muster. There is the deaf man who’s experiencing homelessness on my corner. He meets with neighbors to practice their sign language at the open tables. There are the baristas, the real stars of our show around whom all our subplots are written. Each of them moonlighting as musicians and tattoo artists, they spend their days pouring shots of espresso into dirty chai lattes with varying degrees of flair. They talk to strangers, too. I like to think they get me. They know what it is like to come to know people in passing.
There’s a moment before speaking to someone for the first time where anything could happen. I could be anyone I wanted. I could brush off the years of high school theater training and create some fantasy life as my own. Life is all improv, baby! The world is my stage – should I try on an accent? Or I could lower my voice an octave, stiffen up my wrist, and pretend to be straight. Or maybe I mix it up a bit with a hat. Does anybody still wear a hat? Just for a minute, I could remove the weight that comes along with expectation, the baggage of being known by someone. Or I could be myself and hope that is enough.
I think about those conversations often living in my tiny neighborhood with kind people and common spaces to get to know one another. On the corner, there is a plaque with a poem. I’ve learned its stanzas passing by on my government-sanctioned walks, attempting to memorize a line at a time before the crosswalk light changes.
IN PASSING
There’s a way people come to know each other
without ever speaking –
like on a bus at night
or in an apartment house over the years,
passing each other in the hall,
meeting at the mailbox;
eating in the same diner at opposite ends of the room,
passing in the street year after year
on the way to work or on the way home.
In the silence of the night sometimes,
faces come to us in the darkness –
the faces of people we have known
but never spoken to.
And in the night, these faces glow
with a gentle light
and they’re like the faces of angels
descended from some high place
To tell us it’s all right,
That the loneliness will end,
That somewhere in a place not know to us yet,
We’re together and have always been.
Those faces come to me in quarantine. The baristas and bartenders who have listened to me inconsequentially complain over the years and now find themselves unemployed. Wrinkled faces of older neighbors who would give a knowing nod on their trips to the grocery store and are now at risk and in isolation. The ushers at the theater who never judged when I came to see a musical alone on a Friday night and now have no shows to seat. Sitting in my apartment tonight, I miss them all.
Pandemic has reversed what it means to be in community with one another. To care for those I have come to know, I must limit my exposure to them. For us to be there for one another, we must be apart. Just typing those words puts a lump in my throat. God, I love strangers. I’ve worked intentionally to bring as many into my life as possible. I find them fascinating. I find them contradictory and warm, bitter and broken, empowering, and devastating. I love them all and I miss them already. With no end to this tragedy in sight, this is our new normal. Will we be lonely?
I still smile at strangers even when wearing a facemask. I hope they can tell. I grin wider than usual at the few people I interact with, squishing up my fat cheeks into squinting eyes in hopes my warmth will reach six feet away. Few feel comfortable with small talk in a pandemic, so I’m not sure if anyone has noticed my anguish. And that’s okay. I stay home for them and sing a quiet requiem for strangers. I remind myself that someday the loneliness will end. That eventually, I’ll be able to knock on your door and say, “Hi, I’m Charlie Bonner.”
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